Self

Howard on our Anniversary

By / August 7, 2014 / 1 Comment

I love watching Howard talk and listening to him tell stories. He went to a convention recently and, when he returned home, we stood together in the kitchen while he told me of things that happened while he was gone. I watched his face and the gestures he uses to emphasize points or to make a joke have more impact. Howard in full-out mode is larger than his physical form. It is like he projects himself out into space. I saw all of that and realized, once again, why people are so happy to listen to him in presentations, on panels, or during podcasts. Howard is compelling. I had that thought, and on its heels was a feeling of deep gratefulness that when all the show, presentation, and signing is done, Howard comes home to me. I think that’s a good sign twenty-one years into marriage, that I’m glad to have him come home.

We went out to dinner for our anniversary. we don’t always. In fact our anniversary traditions have had more to do with forgetting to plan anything. Some years we’ve missed it altogether. This year we felt like we ought to do something, so we went to Bombay House and ordered our favorites from the menu. Howard was having a low energy, low mood day. We sat across the table from each other, mostly in silence. I am one of the few that gets to see Howard when he’s low. He trusts me with this, and I help him carry it, just as he helps me when my emotions get unruly. I had a hundred things in my head that we could have talked about, but many of them were related to business, which wasn’t ideal for his mood. Also, I didn’t really want to turn our out-to-dinner date into a business meeting. We have plenty of those at home in the kitchen. Twice or thrice daily, in fact.

“Are you still glad?” I asked Howard during one of the quiet times when our eyes met. He knew what I meant, on that day, on that date. Are you glad we got married? It was a question to which we both already knew the answer, but somehow the asking and the answering gave a tiny ceremony to a part of our lives that we often take for granted. “Yes.” He answered. Even on a low-mood day, we are both still glad.

A mere day later, Howard and I drove together to Salt Lake City to visit a friend from out of town. We talked quietly, about business, about things we saw on the road, about our kids. Howard was not in performance mode. We sat with our friend for hours talking about all sorts of things. We ate more food than we needed, but all of it was delicious. When time came to depart, Howard and I drove home together, mostly in silence. Sometimes there isn’t much that needs to be said, it is enough to be together.

Yes, I’m still glad.

Clearing out the Closet

By / August 4, 2014 / 1 Comment

I ran my hand across the row of skirts. They were things I’d worn, things I still wear, and things I might wear. I began grabbing those in the bracket categories and pulling them off the hangers. It was time to let go of the skirt which could be really cool if only I found the right match for it. It was time to bag the skirt which I used to wear, but no longer feels comfortable. When the skirts were thinned, I did the same for shirts. Anything uncomfortable or stained came off the hangers. My closet had more space. I removed the red shirt I don’t like to wear, but kept because having a red shirt is useful. Now I can see a red shirt gap in my wardrobe and perhaps I’ll look to find a shirt I like to fill that gap.

The closet purge was triggered by a conversation with Howard that clicked into my long-term dissatisfaction with my appearance. My body changed shape in the past few years and I guess I kept hoping it would revert. It was only a shift of five pounds. I’ve had that sort of shift before without needing to adjust my wardrobe. So small a shift seemed like it should be easy to back track. It used to be easy. Or maybe it was denial that let me make do with only two pairs of pants that fit comfortably. I filled in the space between wash days with grubbier-than-usual clothes because elastic waistbands don’t remind me that I can’t zip the pants I used to wear. There was also some stubborn denial in the fact that I don’t want to be a person who complains about getting older or gaining weight, particularly in so small an amount. I know that I have less cause to complain than many women. In fact, I know that I’m very fortunate and that the weight I’m mentally grumbling about is one that women with health issues would be delighted to achieve. My current body shape is socially acceptable and is right on the border between normal and overweight for my height.

The truth is that human bodies want to add weight as they get older. I’m going to have to learn to dissociate my feelings of personal attractiveness from my memories of my twenty or thirty year old body. Even if I do manage to shed five, ten, fifteen pounds, my body will be different than it was before. Also, I think my dissatisfaction with my appearance has far more to do with things going on in my head than with the shape of my body. The things going on in my head were reflected in my closet and drawers which were full of clothes that used to be wonderful, or might be lovely if. I had to clear out all of that, so I can see what really is useful. I don’t need all of my clothes to make me feel pretty, but I certainly need to get rid of the ones that contribute to making me feel ugly. It will take me awhile to fill the gaps in my wardrobe. Money is tight this year and that has led me to hang on to stained clothing because I didn’t want to pay to replace it. Part of what I had to set right in my head is that sometimes I’m allowed to spend clothing budget on me instead of always on Howard or the kids. I always forget that when money gets tight.

I’m not going to give up the fight for those five pounds. I’d like to plant myself firmly in the normal range because I believe that is best for my long-term health and well-being. But I’m going to stop believing that losing weight is the quick path to feeling better about myself.

Writing in Church

By / July 27, 2014 / 2 Comments

My observance of my religion is not practiced in grand gestures, lone pilgrimages, or big revelations. It is me sitting on a padded pew with an open journal in my lap. Sometimes I write for pages, not great spiritual insight, just the daily cares that are in my head. I write all the things which I think are too boring for others to want to listen to. I repeat myself because repetition of thought is necessary in a life that is full of repeated tasks. In that journal I am allowed to spill words without concern for audience. Or rather I’m writing to a very specific audience: myself and God. I like writing my thoughts during church, because the location affects the shape of those thoughts as they spool onto the page. I never can be sure afterward whether there are threads of inspiration in those thoughts.

I do listen to the speakers and the teachers. I probably should be better at putting down my pen and giving them full attention. Some weeks I do. This was one of the weeks where my thoughts were noisy and I had to pin them to a page where I could examine them. I’ve learned to trust that when there is something in a talk that I should hear, I will suddenly find myself listening without having made a conscious decision to do so. Words, phrases, stories, jump out at me sometimes. Even if I was lost in my own thoughts the moment before. Sometimes I write down the pieces which came to me, a non sequitur in the middle of other thoughts.

On some Sundays I flip through things I’ve previously written and my own words jump out at me. I meant them one way when I wrote them, but I need them in a different way when they come to me again. I can only flip through a few months of thoughts. Anything older than that is in a different notebook. The physical requirements of the pages force me not to dwell too much on the past, but to keep moving forward.

I write journals at other times and places besides church. I have the stack of notebooks to bear witness to this. I used to segregate my thoughts into different notebooks, one for life journaling, a different for story fragments, a third for random notes of phone numbers and measurements. Now all of these things go into a single book, one that fits into my purse. All of it is there and none of it is explained. Sometimes I picture a future historian puzzling over cryptic fragments of sentences. A couple of times that “historian” has been me.

Writing my thoughts during church is a small observance. It is a way for me to commune with myself and with inspiration from God. I come away with a clearer plan for what needs to come next. Sometimes I’m given specific directions that are not always what I want to hear. Other times I’m reassured that my choices are good. I don’t know if any of that is apparent in the words themselves. They probably read like someone rambling endlessly about the same routine things that she rambled about last week, last month, last year. Yet I know that last week the flow of feeling and inspiration which came with the words was different than this week. Small observances can be powerful, particularly when they are repeated over time. This is how I build my faith and give myself peace each week. It is how I rest and refill so that I can meet the week to come.

Unwinding the Stress

By / July 25, 2014

I came out of the theater happy even though I wasn’t certain I’d enjoyed the movie. The summer air was warm even at 1am and the world had that quiet feeling it gets when most of the people in the city have already gone to bed. We weren’t alone at that late night showing, but people dispersed quickly afterward. I felt light and free. The movie (Lucy) wasn’t my favorite, but it had many things to discuss, praise, and rant about, which made it a great movie for Howard and I. We love to dissect movies after we’ve seen them. Howard held my hand as we walked to the car. We’ve been married twenty years. We share four kids, a household, and a business. We slip into business conversations without even thinking about it. Yet sometimes we can shed all of that and just be Howard and Sandra. I wanted to stay out in the summer air and just twirl around in that freedom.

Instead I got to dash back to the theater because I’d felt so free that I’d forgotten to pick up my purse when exiting. I got it back without trouble. Even the dash back to the theater felt exhilarating, not worrisome. It was exactly what I needed after a day which had been filled with flashes of random stress and anxiety. We didn’t linger, we went home and to bed like responsible adults who like their jobs and know they get to do them again in the morning. I suppose in my case it helped that my job for the morning was to take the kids to the water park.

Public places like water parks can be highly stressful. For most of my parenting years they were exactly that. Then the kids got older and we became familiar enough with the park that the whole experience was more predictable. I’ve often heard it said that humans seek out novel experiences. Our family does too, but we like the new things to be structured around predictable things. If I have too many variables to track, then I experience stress rather than relaxation. There are times when the stress of new experiences is good. What I wanted and needed was to extend the relaxation which began with the late night movie. So I swam with the kids and felt the sun dry me off. I got just a little bit sunburned in the places that I missed with the sunscreen. We came home ready for a slow afternoon.

I still had things to do, of course. I’d earned a slower day by working frantically earlier in the week, but there were some things that needed to be complete before the weekend. Those things fit into the afternoon between the water park and the church picnic.

Tables were set up in a cul de sac. Some of the men had pulled out their grills and were cooking hamburgers. The members of the congregation had brought their chairs and were mingling around the tables of food and across the lawns. I thought that I probably ought to be reaching out and reconnecting to the many people that I care about who were present. Instead I found myself a quiet spot where I could watch. I wanted to be there, but I had low social energy. I caught up with some friends who came to sit with me. I was glad of that. I also loved watching the multi-generational crowd as they ate and played with the dunk tank set up in front of one of the houses. I’ve lived in this neighborhood long enough to watch some kids grow up and have kids of their own. I loved that I could be part of it, even when I mostly sat and watched.

I walked home in the cooler air of the evening. Our back lawn was soft under my feet. I paused a moment to survey the spot where our deck used to be. I like it better without the deck there. It feels more open. I’ll like it even better when the space is something lovelier than a patch of dirt. Yet it is nice to have a project that can wait until later, when we’re not in high summer. We’ve only a few more weeks of hot summer left.

I’ve been watching the end of July come closer. As soon as we hit August, we’re in the last slide toward the school year. I’ll have to pull out the letters from the school and figure out what they hoped I’d do with the kids over the summer. We’ll have only bare reading logs when the first day of school arrived. The kid read plenty over the summer, but I excused them and myself from tracking or measuring any of it. Today I managed to do the same for myself and it was good.

Anxiety Keeps Me Company Before Conventions

By / July 24, 2014

I’ve been running full speed since Monday morning. I’d reached the week when all of my “I’ll do that later” tasks had become “Do all the things right now, hurry or it will be too late” tasks. Then I dropped eleven packages off at the post office so they could travel to GenCon. Also some price quotes from printers came back and showed that my shiny merchandise idea was not feasible to turn around before GenCon. I still had a big task list, but all the frantic “get this done now” energy was gone. Naturally that is when the anxiety struck. I’m great in crisis or crunch time. I pay for it later. Three days of pushing hard means I have to wind down afterward.

Anxiety chased me all night through dreams with hotels, conventions, missing children, natural disasters, and chainsaws on poles. (The imagery for that last one being the result of the pole saw we purchased for trimming trees. Apparently my brain considers chainsaws to be lethal weapons likely to jump out at people and cause harm. I don’t trust them. But we had a job that needed one, so. It is out in the garage. Just sitting there. Waiting. (Yes I know my thoughts here are not entirely rational. I also know that I really shouldn’t nest parenthetical thoughts. Apparently it is a nested-parenthetical kind of day in my brain.) The box it came in had a picture of it on the side. It was across the room from me while I wrote this blog. I had to get up and throw it away because the picture was making me nervous. But this isn’t a post about chainsaws. The chainsaw is parenthetical.)

I’ve come to an understanding with my anxiety. Sometimes it will show up and yell at me, but I’ve stopped automatically believing everything it says. In fact during the daylight hours I can often stop it before it has any chance to make noise. Which is why it tends to spring on me in those spaces between asleep and awake when my higher brain functions have shut down to rest. I’ll be half asleep and suddenly convinced that the slight twinge in my neck means I have a blood clot in a major artery and it is about to travel to my brain and kill me dead.

I also know why the anxiety is triggering now. I’m trekking through the pre-convention emotional minefield where pockets of old habits and remembered emotion have laid buried since I crossed this same ground in the years before. This time last year was when I came face to face with a major failure. I’d had eight months to set up a point of sale system and I didn’t do it until almost too late. The emotional fallout from that was very memorable and it is why I reacted so strongly to the news that my shiny merchandise idea won’t work. All those failure feelings echoed from last year to this year in an emotional time-vortex. That point-of-sale experience was the beginning of me being able to see how some of my financial and convention management decisions were being driven by anxiety and avoidance rather than considered thought.

This week I felt the pull of old habits. I felt the urge to not bother Howard with information that I thought would stress him. In the past year, I’ve learned that an information vacuum is far more stressful to Howard than a piece of bad news, particularly on financial matters. I’ve been striving to provide regular reports and to not fall into the old patterns. I’ve integrated the new way of thought into regular life, but in preparing for GenCon I’m having to pay attention to my processes instead of just dusting off the habits from last year and using them again.

Sometimes I need to hold information until the right time to share it with Howard. If Howard is in a creative zone, then talking finances will knock him right out of that place. If I time things particularly poorly I can kill an entire day of creative work. If I time things well, the exact same information can be a short business meeting in the middle of a productive day. Judging what I should handle without bothering Howard, what I should ask him about, and when I should ask it; these are the hardest parts of my ongoing job. In relation to GenCon and other large conventions, my parameters for making these decisions have altered since last year.

Knowing why anxiety is giving me grief today does not make it easier to banish. I do have medicine I can take, but taking it impedes my ability to accomplish other things. Perhaps that is what I need, to be excused from accomplishing for a day, but it is very hard to give myself permission to do that. I want to get things done. I want to see projects complete. I want to see that the financial recalibration we’ve done this year is bearing fruit. I want to see the kids do their chores and take them some place fun. I want to trim the trees, weed the flowers, and turn the patch of dirt where our deck used to be into something lovely. I also really want to walk over every inch of this emotional ground and make sure there aren’t any more hidden pockets that might explode.

It is funny how I can have a mostly good day and still be wrestling with small surges of anxiety all the way through it. Life is good. I’m accomplishing things. I’m just more tired than necessary because I’m also expending energy managing these dumb little adrenaline surges. Hopefully a solid night’s sleep will help me reset. I just need to not be running around in my dreams.

Past and Present: Conversations with Other Mothers

By / July 15, 2014 / 3 Comments

Changing diapers was part of my daily existence for ten years. I remember being puzzled at the reactions of people for whom it wasn’t. They spoke of diapers as this huge and distasteful chore. As far as I was concerned, diapers were easy. Keeping hold of my highly-active toddler in a public space while eight months pregnant, that was hard.

Today I am babysitting my sister’s kids and I changed a stinky diaper. I noted within myself exactly the sorts of reactions that used to puzzle me when I observed them in others. The influx of small children means that our toy cupboard vomited its contents across the family room in a way that hasn’t happened since the last time this set of children came to visit. I had to watch and respond to a toddler with my mommy radar turned all the way up to ten, in order make sure that he was safe and that he didn’t endanger any of the things which are important to our family. I used to just flow with these things and bend my life around them. Now it all feels like a big intrusion. I willingly agreed to the intrusion. I like my sister’s kids. I’m glad to watch them for the day. Yet at the end of it I will be quite glad to return to a quieter house.

I’m on the other side of the fence these days. I used to be the mother of young children who mostly stayed home because I didn’t want to impose my personal invading force on society at large. Now I’m the one who gets intruded upon, at home, in public spaces. Mostly I don’t mind or am even amused or enlivened by the presence of other people’s children. I watch with tolerance and sympathy when a toddler tantrums in a grocery store. And, yes, sometimes I observe with annoyance. I like my friends’ kids quite a lot. They are charming little people and I marvel at seeing the world through their eyes and watching them change from visit to visit. Yet in the world at large, it sometimes feels like I’ve become the enemy. I am the mother of older children who is perceived as judging the mother of young children. I am a font of boring stories about when my kids were little. Being around young children brings all those memories to the forefront of my mind, and in that moment I think I remember how hard it all was. I want to help, or make it easier, so I spill the stories in an effort to form some sort of camaraderie. I’m trying to say that we’re all in this together. That is not the result.

My self awareness of this is thanks to a good friend of mine, a mother of a young child, who cared enough about our friendship to address the issue with me. It is hard to be critiqued on this sort of thing. I’ve done a lot of thinking as a result. I’ve also done quite a bit of observation of myself and of others. I’ve come to the conclusion that my years of experience as a parent don’t make me any sort of expert, because my children are different from those of my friends. I raised them in a different decade, in a different social context, with a different house, and a different husband. There are so many differences as to make my solutions and stories irrelevant. Instead of trying to provide help or advice, it is my job to listen. When my friend’s current concern triggers a memory, I should stay with their experience, not intrude mine. At some point in the conversation my friend may outright ask for advice, that is the appropriate time to share something from my own parenting experiences.

Shortly after my friend’s critique I altered my conversational strategies with a different pair of friends who have young children. It was hard at first. All my instincts told me that the way to be friends with other mothers was to talk over our similar experiences. But their current lives match my past, not my present. A story fell out of my mouth out of habit and I watched the conversation dive into a lull as a result. I did better after that. I had a wonderful and emotionally connecting afternoon. It was the first time in a long time I did not spend large portions of the conversation feeling out of step and old. It seems obvious in hindsight, but I had to match their present experiences with my present experiences. The contrast in those experiences was what made the conversation fun for all of us. They were far more interested in hearing about my current dealings with teenagers than in my past struggles with potty training.

I’m very grateful to be making these realizations now, years before I have grandchildren. I shudder to think what unfortunate miscommunication loops I might have set up while trying to “help” my children parent their own kids. I was well on my way to becoming a person I never want to be, and I would have been driven toward it by an ever-more-intense desire to connect.

I still have thinking and learning to do. I have to fine tune when my accumulated experiences add to conversations and when they do not. After all, I started this blog post by delving into a memory. At one point I paused and considered whether I wanted to re-write it, because it seemed to demonstrate exactly the story-dropping behavior that I’m trying to extinguish. I eventually decided that this is my space and an appropriate venue for me to examine my experiences out loud. My experiences may be irrelevant to the world at large, but they are important to me. It is crucial that I see the difference and converse appropriately. It is also crucial that I don’t squelch all my stories in all contexts.

Balance is hard. I’m sure that I’m getting something else wrong as I try to correct this. All I can do is strive onward.

At the End of a Day that Feels like it was Wasted

By / July 9, 2014 / 2 Comments

I wish the list of “things I did today” made me feel better about the list of “things I did not do today, but should have.” It isn’t that I wasted my time. I mean if I spend all day watching cat videos over and over again, then I would be justified in feeling like I should have done better at the end of the day. Instead I have a day where pretty much every moment was spent on something worthwhile, yet it all feels muddled and interrupted. I can very quickly point to the big failure of the day (a missed appointment) and I can’t point to anything that feels like a counter balancing success. The appointment wasn’t even particularly important. Yet the fact that I missed it is evidence of the normal summer muddle that our lives always fall into. Everyone wakes at different times. We eat on different schedules. The kids spend far too much time attached to computer screens, to the point that I feel like a bad parent. Yet to make them do otherwise would take energy which I then would not have available for the work that I need to do.

This was supposed to be the week when I dug in and wrote fiction every day. I was supposed to do that all through the month of June. I didn’t. I was supposed to have the challenge coin PDF completed. There’s a package I said I’d mail two days ago and I haven’t yet. I could keep going. The list is long. Here’s another should: I should focus on the things I did get done and not beat myself up for the things I didn’t. Also I shouldn’t assign myself so many “shoulds” and thus I spin myself into a recursion.

What did I do? Some laundry. Some dishes. I worked on the PDF of Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance, which we hope to put in our store as an ebook if I can get the file size small enough. 160MB seems really big and I’m worried that the store provider will hit us with bandwidth fees. I cooked some food as Howard and I are trying to shift our diets toward being more healthy. I helped Keliana write a contract. Listened to her as she bemoaned the challenges in setting up an etsy shop and having art under contract. She loves the art, but the business side was feeling burdensome today and she needed an ear. I read scripts for Howard. I took a shower. I read for writer’s group. I answered some email. I filled out extensive panelist forms for both Howard and I. There were two conventions and both had a field for “tell us why you’re qualified for this panel.” So I wrote a dozen little sales pitches which I hope will allow Howard and I to participate in programming. I attended writer’s group. I fed a fish.

It really seems like there ought to be more things to account for how I spent my time today. That doesn’t feel like enough things. I look at the list with logic and it has a lot of things, but it doesn’t feel like enough. Whether or not it is enough, the day is mostly gone. I will try again tomorrow.

Out of Context

By / June 20, 2014

Traveling is an exercise in taking yourself out of context.
–Jason Gruber (person on Twitter, who was apparently traveling that day.)

I retweeted the quote, because it perfectly expressed what I’d been feeling. I left Utah and all my usual surroundings. I brought the internet with my in my phone and computer, but increasingly I find myself feeling detached from the goings on there. It is like all those things belong to another life, one I’ve been scooped out of.

In a strange way, I’ve also been put back into a context that I’ve been absent from for a very long time. I’m staying in the house where I grew up. Everywhere I look there are reminders of my childhood years, teenage years, even of my visits as a young mother. I was so glad to fly free and build my own life, because the possibilities excited me. I’ve always been a person who sheds excess things. I got rid of my school yearbooks. I discarded most of the objects from my childhood. (with the exception of books. I keep the books.) Yet here I am in a place which remembers all of those things and stores many of them in solid form.

I would have thought that I’d worked through all this “past and present coming together” with my past visits. It’s not like I’ve never been back, I’ve come every few years. Except, in a way, I haven’t ever come back at all. My visits here have always been short, a week or less, bookended with travel. It was just enough time to visit with my parents and see a thing or two. This trip, I’m holding still. I’m looking around at the house, at the neighborhood, at my old schools, at my hometown. I’m thinking about these things and about who I was. I’m also thinking about who I am now. The more I think, the more I realize that this location is full of people who knew me long ago. Meeting back up with Rae Carson in January showed me the value in reconnecting. Part of me wants to reach out to people. But habit is strong, and, truly, I’m here for my Grandma, I shouldn’t be flitting about like a social butterfly.

I did walk to my old elementary school and back. I’m certainly not the first person to walk in her childhood neighborhood and discover that it feels smaller than she remembered. When I can pick up and drive 800 miles on my own, the walk to school and back does not have the same adventurous feeling it had when I was nine. I did take some pictures for a post I intend to write about what California looks like to me.

Tomorrow I get to have lunch with a friend whom I’ve known since I was twelve. She’s one of the few that I kept in touch with, even before Facebook was a thing. I expect we’ll talk endlessly and wish we had more time. I wonder what pockets of memory we’ll uncover in our conversations.

Home feels very far away and not just in miles. I’m pretty sure it is just a coping strategy of my brain to pack away the home thoughts so that they aren’t cluttering up my thinking space. I certainly am glad that the anxiety has calmed down, or maybe that has just shifted too. Instead of jolts of momentary panic, I’m having restless dreams and my teeth ache. With certain sorts of subconscious stress, I clench my teeth together. I’m not even aware that I’m stressed except after awhile my teeth will hurt. I’m not certain whether it is from being away from home or concern about the long drive ahead of me. It could also simply be triggered by my surroundings and all the churn through my childhood memories.

I remember coming home from college for the first time and realizing that though my parents had kept a space for me, I’d changed so that I no longer fit that space. It used to feel like hard work to retain my changes when I came home. I suppose that was one of the reasons I kept my visits short during the early years. Then it was habit and I had piles of neurosis telling me that I couldn’t leave my home for long anyway. I no longer feel like my surroundings are trying to press me into a space that I’ve grown out of. Instead I feel like I’m living small. I’m occupying a guest space, trying to make sure the house is run as Grandma expects it to be, and be myself in the space that is available. I’m keeping a tight rein on the part of me that wants to reorganize all the things. Because if I lived fully to the edges of me, I would do that massive reorganization. Which would be unnecessary and intrusive. This is my mother’s house, not mine. There is nothing wrong with the way that my Mom organizes. I just have a compulsion to control my environment. I can do that again when I go home. So I focus small, and that means that I feel out of touch with all the things that are not right in front of me.

I miss Howard, Kiki, my house, and the cat. Five more days.

Adventures in Tax Payments and Family Travel

By / June 16, 2014

We’ve been self employed for years, but we’re set up as a corporation, so mostly we’ve handled tax payments through withholding. Then our tax accountant told us about a different way to handle things which saves us money. It all makes sense, but it means that this is the first year that I’m paying estimated quarterly taxes. The first payment was due April 15, so I thought the second payment would be due July 15. Nope. June 15. I discovered this fact because fellow self-employed people were complaining on twitter. I confirmed it and then realized I was presented with a problem. All my accounting things are in Utah, including my checkbook. I am in California for another week. Truthfully it all could have waited a week. The government would probably not have argued with me if I willingly made payment before they had a chance to notice that it was late. But I don’t like to be late on this sort of thing. It makes me anxious.

This sort of thing is exactly why we planned this trip with Kiki going home to hold down the fort. She flew home this morning, which meant that I could call the house and walk her through the process of finding and filling out the necessary payment coupon. Howard was at home to sign the check. (I suppose if Kiki had not been there, I would have walked Howard through the process, but Kiki is really good about going into assistant mode these days. Howard’s assistant mode is really rusty. The dynamic feels backward.) I had the money ready and waiting because of the past few months of careful budgeting. In a way it was all reassuring. There was a problem, an important thing that was left undone, and then thirty minutes later the thing was done. It makes me feel like I might be competent at least a little bit.

I’ve spent some time looking at how I arranged this trip and examining why I made the choices that I did. I’m rarely certain that I’ve chosen right because I can see so many other options. Howard stayed home, which is the lowest stress option for him. It allowed him to recover from being sick and hopefully will allow him to rebuild the buffer. Yet I know that he misses out on some of the bonding which happens with a family trip. Much of that bonding occurs precisely because the trip is stressful. Less stress = missed shared experiences. I can’t see a way to have both. Knowing that I was sending Kiki back to manage the online store was the only way I could feel good about being absent for so long. The last time I spent two weeks away from home it was 1999 and we didn’t have a time-dependent home business. Even there though, I wonder how much of my decision making is driven by unreasonable anxiety. The world would not end if packages waited an extra week. So many of my urgent business tasks are far less urgent than they feel on a daily basis. It is only when I put myself in a position where I can’t jump and solve an issue at a moment’s notice that I’m aware how much of my day is spent jumping to solve issues as if they are emergencies. On this trip I jump and then don’t have any of my tools, so the next few minutes are spent explaining to myself why it will all be fine anyway. So far I’ve been gone for five days. There have been some lovely, long relaxed hours. There have also been hours where my brain jolted with adrenaline five or eleven times because of things remembered or half-remembered that for an instant had me convinced that disaster would result because I could not manage them right away. Those were not my favorite hours.

As of today the reunion part of the trip is over. Most of the relatives have departed home. My parents are off to Hawaii for their golden honeymoon. My sister has settled in to be with my Grandma until Thursday. Then we’ll trade off and I will stay with Grandma until my parents return the next week. That makes today the settling-in day. It is the day when I let the kids watch too much TV and play too many video games. I breathe deep and decide how I am going to spend the time between now and the day when I’m on duty to take care of Grandma. It is the day when I talk Kiki through the business processes that she’ll manage while I’m away. It is also the day where I think through how I arranged this trip and face my guilt that I put Howard and Kiki at home to work while I’m away with the other three kids. I picked the option with minimal work disruption instead of maximal family togetherness. I have to think about that choice. Because there need to be times when I arrange it the other way around. Of course, I could have just said no to the entire trip which would have resulted in zero life disruption and zero extended family togetherness. We all would have missed much with that choice.

I have more thinking to do, but after today we’ll have several outing days in a row which will likely interfere with the thinking. That in itself might be a good thing, as I probably think too much. For today, the kids are playing with cousins, Kiki traveled home safely, Howard is no longer alone in the house, and the taxes are paid. I’ll count that good enough for now.

Thinking Week

By / May 29, 2014

“Are you okay? You seem a little off this morning.” Howard said to me from across the kitchen counter. At first I tried to answer that I was just tired. It is true that I’m tired, but more is going on than that. I’ve been off for most of the week. Some of it is due to the fact that I had a necessary conversation with a friend. It is the sort of conversation which is important to have so that everyone stays friends. I’m glad my friend saw the need. I’m still soul searching and thinking as a result. Unfortunately soul searching tends to scare the demons of self-doubt out of the corners where they’ve been hiding. But I already wrote a post about that, and the noise has mostly settled anyway, so it wasn’t really what Howard was seeing this morning. (Also I probably need to write an entirely different post about how a loving personal critique from a friend can save hundreds of future conversations not with just that friend, but with others as well. I’m pretty sure that is going to be the outcome here and it’s worth wading through a cloud of demons.)

We’re in the final week of school, which means we have a routine that is only sort-of normal. Instead of having a pattern so familiar I can almost ignore it, I have to look at each day and remember its special parameters. This day is the dance festival, that day is the drama showcase, Link comes home early all week, Gleek and Patch have partial days on Friday. None of it is a surprise. The patterns are familiar from prior years, but I have to think about them.

The shipment of Longshoreman of the Apocalypse arrived yesterday. That means life has switched over into high-gear shipping mode. After nine Schlock books, two picture books, two XDM books, and thirty thousand coins, shipping is familiar. Yet for the past several years I’ve had my friend Janci as an auxiliary brain during shipping season. This year Janci was booked solid and Kiki needs college money, so Kiki has taken on the role of auxiliary brain. Kiki is doing a fine job, but the role is new to her. As with the final week of school, the patterns are familiar, but I’m having to think through all of them.

Add physical fatigue because boxes of books are heavy and some sleep deprivation because I haven’t been getting to bed on time. Yup Howard, I was a little off. There was a lot of thinking to be done this week. The good news is that most of the thinking is complete. All that remains is to do the things.